March 24 (Bloomberg) -- A review of the U.S. deportation
system ordered by President Barack Obama is seen by pro-immigration Democrats as good policy and good politics.

It’s appeasing the party’s Senate leaders, who’d rather
criticize the Republican-led House over immigration policy than
spar with the White House over deportations.

Administration officials and staff for top Senate
Democrats, including Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, met
privately on March 11 as the party aims to alleviate tensions
heading into the November congressional election.

Senate staff told administration representatives that
Obama’s options include stopping the deportations of parents of
U.S. citizens and others who would be protected under a Senate
bill that passed last year, according to a person familiar with
the meeting who requested anonymity to describe it.

“There are a lot of people hoping for these changes,”
said Eliseo Medina, head of an immigration campaign for the
Service Employees International Union, which claims 2.1 million
members. The group spent $41 million supporting mostly Democrats
in the 2012 election, according to the Center for Responsive
Politics, a Washington group that tracks political spending.

Deportations have been at the center of a debate over
whether to provide a path to citizenship for people living in
the U.S. illegally, the most contentious part of immigration
revamp bill that the Senate passed last year.

Microsoft, Caterpillar

More than 640 groups and companies including Microsoft
Corp. and Caterpillar Inc. lobbied on immigration issues in
2013, a 79 percent increase from 2012, according to the Center
for Responsive Politics.

A broad, employment-based revamp of immigration policy
would benefit the world’s biggest economy, adding about 3.2
percentage points to real gross domestic product in the next 10
years while cutting $150 billion from the budget deficit,
according to a report last week from Beth Ann Bovino, chief U.S.
economist for Standard & Poor’s.

Obama’s announcement this month that his administration
would find ways to “more humanely” enforce immigration laws
earned praise from Democratic lawmakers and Hispanic groups on
an issue that Medina said may become prominent in some
congressional contests in November.

Still, that unity may be short lived, said Representative
Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat and an influential voice
within his party on immigration policy.

‘Ultimate Resolution’

“I want to make sure we don’t take our foot off any pedal
that’s moving the engine toward the ultimate resolution,” he
said in an interview. “And in the end, the ultimate resolution
is to pass a bill.”

The measure the Senate passed has been stalled in the
House.

Obama’s support among Hispanics has been waning as
deportations averaged 1,000 a day last year, more than under any
other president. The president’s job approval rating among
Hispanics is 52 percent, according to a poll released last week
by Gallup, down from 73 percent in a survey last May.

In Colorado, where Democratic Senator Mark Udall seeks re-election this year, 53 percent of Hispanic voters disapprove of
Obama’s performance, according to a Public Policy Polling survey
released last week. Exit polls show Obama won 71 percent of the
Hispanic vote nationally in 2012, including 75 percent in
Colorado.

Labor Groups

The president has been under pressure from churches and
labor groups, including the AFL-CIO, who say he can gain favor
with Hispanic voters by changing deportation policies.

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, has said Obama
would increase his leverage with Republicans on the immigration
issue by halting deportations for all but violent criminals. The
labor group, which says it has 12.5 million members, spent $31.7
million helping elect mostly Democrats in 2012, according to the
Center for Responsive Politics.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat,
said in December that Obama should reduce deportations. That
followed concerns raised by Richard Durbin of Illinois, the
Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, before Jeh Johnson was confirmed as
secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. In a letter to
Johnson, Durbin said he was troubled that the administration
deported 200,000 parents of U.S. citizens from 2010 to 2012.

Schumer’s Statement

New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the chamber’s No. 3
Democrat, this month released a statement calling on the
administration to halt deportations of immigrants who would be
able to stay under the Senate bill. That measure, opposed by
House Republican leaders, would create a path to citizenship for
many of the 12 million undocumented workers in the U.S.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus was set to vote March 13
on a resolution backing Schumer’s statement until the White
House asked them to postpone the action pending a meeting
between some of its members and Obama in the Oval Office,
Gutierrez said in an interview.

That night, Obama told Gutierrez and two other caucus
members that he’d asked Johnson to take an inventory of
deportation practices to “see how it can conduct enforcement
more humanely within the confines of the law,” according to a
statement the White House issued at the time.

Goal Achieved

“Everybody felt like our goal had been accomplished,”
Gutierrez said about the group’s decision to sidetrack its vote
and instead work with Obama on the issue. “We want to find
solutions with him, and this opened that door.”

The next day, the president met with 17 immigration
advocates for almost two hours, describing “the deep concern he
has for the pain these families face” when they’re separated
because of deportations, according to another White House
statement.

Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration
Forum, a Washington-based group that supports easing U.S.
immigration laws, said he left the session thinking that Obama
wouldn’t take any action until at least August, when lawmakers
take a monthlong break.

“It seems this review will go through that period,”
Noorani said in an interview.

The legislative process would be doomed if Obama
sidestepped Congress and took any major executive actions, said
Marc Rosenblum, deputy director of the U.S. immigration policy
program for the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute.

‘Big Way’

“For the president to make any broad changes would really
set the legislative discussion back in a big way,” Rosenblum
said in an interview.

Peter Boogaard, a Homeland Security Department spokesman,
said it was premature to discuss specific considerations. He
said the review Obama ordered was “ongoing and will be
conducted expeditiously.”

While White House and the Homeland Security officials
declined to provide details of what the inventory will entail,
advocates have offered their own definitions of what more humane
deportation policies would look like. They’ve identified changes
that would protect millions of undocumented workers from
deportation.

Medina of the SEIU and others have said Obama should expand
his 2012 action that blocked deportation of some undocumented
immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. Exempting their
parents, as well, could spare about 500,000 immigrants from
being expelled, Rosenblum said.

Jobs Exemption

Another recommendation -- exempting undocumented immigrants
who have jobs in the U.S. -- would protect as many as 6.4
million more people, according to a May 2013 estimate from the
Migration Policy Institute.

One of the suggestions from Senate staff members to Reid,
Durbin, Schumer and New Jersey’s Bob Menendez -- to exempt
parents of U.S. citizens -- would mean protecting 4.4 million
adults from deportation, according to a January report by the
National Foundation for American Policy, a Virginia-based
research group that focuses on immigration among other issues.

Medina said stricter adherence to the administration’s own
policies would limit some deportations. While officials have
said deportations are spurred by national security, public
safety and border protection concerns, Medina and others say the
policy has been applied more broadly.

“If they just implement those policies accordingly, it
will go a long way to solving the problem,” he said in an
interview.